Welcome to my unholy melee guide, where we sacrifice easy gameplay for awesome eye candy! We are going to be a spell-based melee paladin, specializing in the unholy tree and on attack procs to eventually deal 3 types of elemental damage.

Before we begin, keep in mind that trying to play this build completely untwinked is going to be a massive challenge, so if you’re a brand new player looking for an easy farming character, this is NOT it. However if you have the patience and do enjoy the difficulty curve by all means, let us continue…

Pros:

Loads of eye-candy procs.

Ability to charm our enemies to fight each other!

Fairly steady difficulty progression. It's fairly hard to play successfully from beginning to end, however there aren't really any massive spikes of difficulty.

Most of the gear is easy to obtain.

Cons:

Because of eye-candy, we sometimes get sprite overflow/fps drops.

Doesn't particularly excel at anything, but it isn't too weak at anything either.

Quite difficult to play and weaker than most other melee classes because we are essentially a caster-build that needs to go into melee range to cast.

Our main skills will be Terror Strike and Lemures, with Black Sleep to control difficult enemies.

Plague avatar will proc quite often so we will be able to deal with cold immunes. Always have Bear Stance active on right mouse button.

If you need to get Bloodlust, just attack something non-poison immune until you proc a Plague Avatar, then quickly switch to "Koth's Lesson" to get the Bloodlust CTC on kill proc.

Always keep yourself buffed with Hymn, Rapture, Tainted Blood etc. and use Vindicate if you need the extra regen.

Early Game Farming SpotlightTerror Fauztinville is the best place for us in the early game after obtaining some of the basic charms. This is because most of the mid-game items will require shrinecrafts to replace our honorifics/TUs and the general area is relatively easy to farm once you are 120.

You can also obtain most of the basic charms, although some will require some patience since we are a melee character.

Random Early Game Pictures

(Click to increase size)

3. Mid Game Items

Not much else to say here, just replace your honorifics/TUs with Sacred Shrine crafts (CSD/-ECR bonus), following the gear concepts I listed earlier. Also try to get some decent rare rings at this stage with +skills / energy factor / CSD/PSD% / -ECR/EPR. Make note of the boots that I've decided to drop to ilvl 1 - this is because some crafts are better to forgo some affixes for more MO space. If you're interested in the mechanics behind this, I have a short section explaining in my WNG-din guide here: http://www.medianxl.com/t954-v6d-wng-din-the-unholy-caster

Pictures of new gear and stats

Spoiler:

Mid Game Farming SpotlightChrysaor (easy) is your best source of SUs, and although we don't farm as fast as a traditional caster, we can still do decently with some mid-game gear.

4. End Game Items

Once you have Stormflyer SSU Kite Shield, you will now have a source of lightning damage, which means we need to get some LSD%/-ELR accordingly. The rest are pretty basic, just get as much SD% as you can from gear. There are some better setups out there, just keep an eye out for SUs you manage to obtain and mix/match using the gear concepts we have been following.

End Game Equipment

Weapon:

*Keep T6/Sacred "Demhe" Flail Zod RW. Double Orb Effect.

Shield:

*"Stormflyer" SSU Kite Shield-Our source of lightning damage.

Body Armor:

*"Robe of Steel" SU Full Plate Mail-Rainbow Elemental Spell Damage

Belt:

*Ornate Shrine Sacred Sash Craft-We need this to get some LSD%/-ELR.

Helm:

*"Eyes of Septumos" SSU Circlet or Sacred Shrine Craft-Use SSU Circlet if you manage to get a decent one for psn/light/cold SD%, otherwise keep mid-game craft

*"Shamanka" SU Long Staff or "Qarak's Will" SSU Giant Sword for Bloodlust-Socket these with Nih Runes for more duration

Sample Video in Fauztinville of a Twinked End-Game Paladin

5. Uberlevels & Bosses

This section will be colour coded by their difficulties. Green means you can come here with Early Game gear and succeed, Olive is moderate (mid-game) and Dark Red will indicate very difficult (will need some end-game gear). Keep in mind, you can do most of the moderate difficulty stuff even in early game gear, its just a lot more challenging. Conversely, if something I set as green seems too hard, just leave it alone until you've progressed to mid-game.

Dungeon Uberquests

Creature of Flame: The buff from Astral Guardians don’t last long enough to be useful and we will accidentally kill them if we try to melee using Lemures. So the easiest method is to just clear the room and kite + let SoD kill him.

Infernal Machine:This basically just fighting a bunch of elites. Use Black Sleep to charm some and focus on the IM with Lemures until it dies.

Death Projector:Kite the mechanics and kill the boss using Lemures. Trying to do this will all the mechanics can be tough, so drag most of them away and leave 1-2 behind just to drop the invulnerability shield. Try to stay away from 4-5 o’clock position, as that’s where the beam begins.

Azmodan:Super easy for us. Run around using Black Sleep until you find Azmodan, then just Lemures him to death.

Rathma Square:Similar concept to Azmodan. Black Sleep will force the bladestorms to target the gore crawlers instead of you, so you can Lemures freely.

Cathedral of Vanity: The fastest way to do this is to just get your merc and suicide rush the crystal ball. 1 Plague Avatar will kill it, and the rest can be dealt with slowly using Black Sleep to charm them + Lemures.

Toraja:Black Sleep the Celebrants/Morlus and summon Edyrems on top of Lilith then melee her to death. Sometimes you might die because of broadside – if this happens, just remake since the general method is quite fast anyway. Video of this can be found in my WNG-din guide.

Vizjun:I prefer to speed run this with Black Sleep and rush to the MCS, but if you have enough damage output, you can choose to take it slowly and just kill everything in your path. There’s no real secret here other than avoid the minefields (spinning rocks) and stand away from MIRV nukes (indicated by pulsing orange circles). This place is more of a gear check than anything else, so come in when you have a good amount of gear.

Summoning Uberquests

The Butcher:Use 1 MO daystars in rings to lure butcher into his circles, then lemures to kill.

Binding of Baal:Similar to how LC2 was, except this time you’ll need 445 in fire/cold/light in order to not die instantly. Make sure you get as much perfect bloodstones/onyxes/ambers for max resists. You can utilize Black Sleep here to force them to fight each other.

Assualt on Mt. Arreat:Prepare to die a few times in here, but other than that, it’s a lot like BoB. Kill the minions, kill the boss. It helps to split them up across the area. Again, use Black Sleep to control them.

Akarat:Leave this one alone until at least mid-game since you need to outdps his regen, but once you have a decent amount of PSD%, 1 plague avatar will finish him.

Jitan: Just use corner exploit for this one, unless you want to fight for a very long time. You need enough damage to outdps his regen here so you might have to wait for some decent gear first. Also, note that the Slayer skill can permanently Knockback lock him against a wall, so its basically a free kill once he’s alone if you alternate between slayer casts and Terror Strike.

Legacy of Blood:Use Black Sleep and Lemures and the charm is yours. Try to stay out of wychwind (the blue fire).

Judgement day: You can choose to leave this one for later when you have more damage output. Otherwise, prepare for several remakes since you’re going to have to use the lure method (video can be seen in my Kickstarter Sin or Unholy Casterdin guide). Once he’s lured, same concept applies as usual but after the avatar is spawned, you need to lure the new Edyrems back upstairs so you can take your time and Lemures the avatar down. The bonus (where you kill both avatars) can be obtained in the same way, its just time consuming.

Brother LazThis one gets its own section since there are quite a few things to keep in mind. First of all, read the offline documentation and understand what this boss does and what the totems do. Next, we need to put together a new set of gear. We're going to need:

100% Open Wounds

Remove any reanimates, AoE procs (from both gear and charms)

50% Slow Target or Slow Melee Target (these two are mutually exclusive and override each other, so pick 1 and stack ONLY that).

Our main attack against Laz will be Terror Strike or Shadow Refuge from crafted Paladin Maces (to apply OW), since both gives us a nice survival boost and isn’t AoE. The basic idea is to walk around the Proving Grounds area, using purify and applying OW, which deals about 3k damage until Laz dies while staying away from his totems. Wolf stance from 2-piece community set can be used for FRW or Bear Stance from crafted paladin shield for more def/DR%.

The Method:

In your first 20-30 attempts, don’t even try to kill Laz. Your immediate goal should be to bring him down to 50% HP reliably. When you get to that stage, you've basically beaten him. Next step is to actually kill him for real

This can be done by either rolling a fire shrine map and use it to bring him down to 50% hp and kill, or you can commit to a clean-up method. Basically the idea behind the clean-up method is to fight Laz until about 3/4 of the map is filled with totems/groupies, and then use either Merc Bomb SSSU Armour or a 2nd player to destroy the totems/groupies for you, so you can re-run that area. As a paladin we can also utilize ranged skills like Mindflay or Slayer to clean up since groupies/totems do not have much HP and can be killed even when naked.

The other method is to just lure him out to the Flayer Jungle and just keep moving and hitting until he dies, since the outside area is large enough to kill Laz without needing to backtrack. This allows us to ignore totems/groupies

MNX has a nice video showing the method on assassin, the link to his video is found here: http://www.medianxl.com/t679-the-ultimate-fight. I do it slightly differently by luring Laz to Flayer Dungeon Level 2 when I need to clean-up, then use a second character to clean up the entire Proving Grounds Area. When the area is clear, I lure Laz back down to the Proving Grounds, and this is generally enough to get the kill. If you run out of space again, simply rinse and repeat (although you might want to clear out the Flayer Dungeon Level 2 Stairs first, if you need to clean-up for a 3rd round).

Various Tips:

I always like to keep Laz ABOVE me so I can always predict roughly where he will appear.

Always make sure you have some free space to move after the teleport so you don’t get trapped in with his totems/groupies. This just takes some trial and error and you get to learn which corners/areas are most dangerous for you in the Proving Grounds.

When I’m getting ready for him to teleport on top of me, I like to shift and left click Terror Strike/SR, just above my character, thus swinging at the air where Laz is likely going to teleport. Using this method gives you A LOT more time to react and move away, rather than waiting for him to teleport AND THEN attacking, since most humans have a reaction time of 200-400ms. If you’ve ever pked in cLoD as a smiter, this is actually quite similar. Just pretend a nado druid or hdin is about to teleport on top of you (except its Laz, not a nado druid ).

Uberlevels

K3KBA: Just keep hitting the bottom right necromancer until he drops the charm.

Island of the Sunless Sea:This one's gotten much harder in 6d because of the Revelers. Come with some decent gear for killspeed and use T6 Bone shield + Angel Star to reach 40% magic resist cap and the charm will be yours.

Kalimgrad:Just hit the avatar directly above the entrance until you get a decent charm. The rest of the map can be cleared, but generally just re-running the first avatar is fastest.

Tran Athulua: Black Sleep is very amusing to use here. P8 is doable just by abusing Black Sleep to ensure 100% charm drop from the Amazon bosses.

Fauztinville: I wouldn’t do this area until you have at least transitioned to mid-game gear from Terror Fauztinville. General idea is as always, Black Sleep + Lemures.

Ghosts of Old Bremmtown:You some decent defence (400k+) and kill speed to get through here without dying. Use Edyrems/reanimates (easy to get via skeleton MO) to distract them/pull them out of their hiding spots and use Black Sleep as usual to get some of them to fight for you. After that, just walk down toward the bottom area and a few hits will take care of the boss.

Kingdom of Shadow:The easiest way to do this one is to stack 445 psn resist and 95 max psn resist + as much def/vit as you can (quiet shrine crafts). Use SSU Long Sword (spin to win oskill) and the rest is easy. FRW also helps here since it will let you do faster runs. There are maps for Ureh floating around the forums so have a look around. The boss himself is fairly weak, just watch out for his lightning spiral on death. You can either attempt to quickly pick-up the charm or TP back to town and wait until the spiral is over and pick up the charm safely.

Duncraig:Assur is the boss here, but first you’ll need Assur’s Bane ring. This is obtained by killing the 5 generals scattered throughout the area (this edited map from my sin guide shows their positions: http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/7900/duncraig.png) and transmute their 5 sigils with Ring of the Five (which drops randomly from any mob in Duncraig) to get Assur’s Bane. Against Assur himself, you can either equip some honorific gloves with stacked fire resists/perf bloodstones or you can use Daystar MOs to distract him (since they’re fire immune) and purify him and kill with a few Terror Strike hits.

Heroic BossesMechanics Intro: First of all, understand that heroic bosses drop their immunities randomly from time to time. If you have something like MXL Utilities to show enemy resists, you’ll notice they randomize every second. Once this value falls below a certain threshold, that’s when the immunity drops and the boss is now subject to taking damage from that element. Because this new value is always going to be between -100 and 99, we stack -199 enemy resist to ensure that when that element drops, they will ALWAYS have -100 in that resist (so I.e. worst case scenario, he drops immunity but still retains 99 cold resist, -199 ECR means the boss will ALWAYS have -100 cold resist, but ONLY when cold immunity drops). Keep in mind poison immunity does not drop on most bosses (exception of Belial and BPR).

Also note that the area may or may not spawn the heroic boss. It’s better if it doesn't spawn, since it means you can clear out the area before using Dark Summoning to bring the boss out (can take a decent amount of tries before the boss spawns).

Baal:The easiest heroic boss for us. Just make sure to have -199 cold resist and as long as you can kill his shards faster than he summons them, Baal will die eventually.

Bull Prince Rodeo:Angle yourself against a 90 Degree wall (watch the WNG-din heroic video guide to see what I mean) to protect yourself against the stampeding cows and hoof stomp (aka blast wave). After you set that up, it’s just a matter of hitting with Lemures until he drops either poison or cold resist. You can get some neato reanimates from him so farm him until you get some decent stats + useful reanimate.

Belial:Quite easy for us since he drops poison immunity. Just use the same method shown in my WNG-din video, except instead of using Lightning Wall, we are using Lemures + plague avatar procs.

Quov Tsin:Stack 445 and 95 max in all resists except poison (just get 445 for psn, since Tainted Blood gives us a decent amount already). The idea is to just chase him around the map (that you hopefully cleared first) with Lemures until he dies. This can take a decent while, but he can’t really outdps our Tainted Blood, unless you get hit by hive, in which case just take a potion to outheal that. It is however, a lot faster to just put together a Mindflay gear set, especially if you want to farm him for a good charm + trophy (see WNG-din guide for that method).

Astrogha:I’d rather you read my WNG-din guide and put together some honorific gear and just Mindflay him and get the charm in around 3-4 minutes, but if you insist on meleeing him, put together a new set of gear revolving around –199 EFR/FSD% and use Blood thorns to kill him. His frozen orb will 1 shot you though, so it could take a few hours to get the charm…

6. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

While playing this build, you may have noticed a major flaw in the unholy melee skill tree - we are essentially forced to be a caster (none of our skills carry WDM other than Terror Strike), yet we are forced to go into melee range to cast. We also don't have the survivability of many of the other WDM based melee builds that have easy methods to reach huge amounts of defense due to their passives (e.g. Barb or Holy Meleedin). Instead we have to use Bear Stance for survival, which denies us the possibility of using 2 handed weapons or other nice SU shields. There are various other issues to address regarding balance of this skill tree, yet it is still enjoyable to play if you don't mind the challenge.

Overall, a fun but weak build (in comparison to other melee builds), and most importantly we have tons of eye candy procs to fill our monitors with shiny lights! I hope you enjoyed playing and reading this guide, and as always feel free to ask questions.

GLHF!

Last edited by BassToMouth on Thu Feb 07, 2013 4:46 am; edited 8 times in total